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Physician and researcher Dr. Paul Offit has spent most of his professional career advancing the understanding of the genetics of rotavirus, a disease that kills nearly 1 million children each year. His work has lead to the development of a rotavirus vaccine developed by Merck. Yet Offit has been the target of abuse and death threats. “They say I am directly responsible for the death and damage of hundreds of children” and that “my day of reckoning is coming,” he writes. His crime? Offit has publicly stated vaccines do not cause autism.

The controversy over vaccines and autism began after British physician Andrew Wakefield published an article British medical journal The Lancet claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused digestive tract problems that lead to the neurological damage associated with autism. The British newspapers ran with the story, which spread to the United States. But Wakefield’s theory was discredited and it turned out he received nearly a million dollars from trial lawyers to do his “research.”

As Offit notes in his new book “Autism’s False Prophets,” in was too late. “Many parents had been persuaded by the MMR controversy that vaccines caused autism. When studies exonerated MMR, they reasoned it must be something else in vaccines causing the problem. It wouldn’t be long before they believed they had found it.”

And indeed, in the wake of the MMR-autism scare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended removing thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, from vaccines even though there was no evidence it was unsafe. Offit explains that Neal Halsey, a pediatrician advising the CDC on vaccines, pushed for an immediate removal of thimerosal after seeing signs on a fishing trip “warning people about eating fish with mercury.”

Others on the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee believed, based on science, that not only was thimerosal safe, but that suggesting that it was not would lead to a decline in protection against infectious diseases. As Offit notes the “CDC statement would be an ominous predictor of future events.” Halsey threatened to go to the media and trial attorneys so the advisory committee caved in.

Many parents are now refusing to vaccinate their children, driving immunization rates in some areas below levels needed to provide “herd immunity” and leading to outbreaks of measles. And for stating that vaccines are safe, Offit has been deemed a monster complicit in a corporate drive to poison kids for the sake of profit.

Science has been shoved aside, threatened into silence by the media, Congress and trial attorneys. Someone is cashing in on this shift, Offit declares. Mostly it’s the trial attorneys and the quacks that want parents to spend tens of thousands of dollars on “chelation, Lupron, sonar depuration, cranial manipulation, laser therapy, camel’s milk, magnetic clay and hyperbaric oxygen,” and many more.

Offit closes with the realization that widespread distrust and misunderstanding of science – and a corresponding embrace of pseudoscience – is the ultimate side effect of the vaccine controversy. Although arguably the most courageous and most knowledgeable scientist about vaccines in the United States, Offit lives in fear for his life and that of his family.

As Mark Twain observed: The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.